Phoenix,
The official season is upon us! There is kind of a lot in here so I'll cut to the chase.
Practices
The first thing to know is that we are officially beginning practices Monday-Friday. Those practices are considered mandatory if you want to run in the varsity races, and consistent absences will result in removal from the races all together.
If you are out of town this week, just let us know and we can work around it. For future reference, work schedules and other commitments need to be moved around the practice schedule. We don't have flexibility with practice times, so that is what we've signed up for.
As far as practice times when school begins, they will be at 2:40, except for 9th graders, which will be a bit later. More on that to come, hopefully early this week.
Pre-Region - Thursday
Our first race is this week! If you've looked at the schedule, you've noticed that we race just about every other week from here on out. That is by design, and a trend that most teams seem to be following, as increased understanding about recovery and training between races comes out. In short, if we're to both recover and improve between races, we need time to train and to recover. Races are maximum efforts, obviously, and require time afterwards to recover. Training/workouts increase adaptation to new heights, and also require recovery, so without sufficient time between each race, we're doing our athletes a disservice.
With that said, with not as many races as in the past, each race matters! Prepare yourselves physically and mentally to be at your best each week so you can see those improvements.
For this week's race, some of the other teams insist on having a 2-mile race option, so there is a 2 mile race, and a 5k race. For our athletes, most of you will run the 5k. You've trained well enough to this point that you can handle it. Please speak with the coaches if you feel like the 2 mile race is a better option for you, and we'll come find you if we think it may apply to you.
Bus Times
The buses will leave from the West side of the high school at 6:40 AM. I know it's early, but that's so we can get there in time to warm up and be ready to race for any girls in the 2 mile race. Everyone is expected to ride the buses to and from the meet this week.
Race times - these are an estimate and could vary slightly
8:00 AM - Girls 2 mile
8:30 AM - Boys 2 mile
9 AM - Girls 5k
9:40 - Boys 5k.
Register my athlete
As shared since our very first parent meeting back in May, every athlete needs to have completed registration via "register my athlete" BEFORE they will be allowed to compete. All the hoops need to be jumped through and completed or you cannot compete. If you've submitted everything and it says "pending approval" or something like that, that just means the AD needs to go an approve everything still, so as long as you submitted all pages of the physical and all other necessary items, then you'll probably be good to go.
Once again, here is the information for registration.
Sporttrax
All, or most, of our meets will be on an app called "Sporttrax". If you don't have the app, I recommend downloading it and creating a free account. From there athletes can "claim" their profile and parents can follow athletes to see updates. You can also see the meet results.
Practice times, locations, and Uniforms
On Monday we are going to do an afternoon practice at the High School, starting from the north end of the building. We will also hand out uniforms to those who don't have them at that time.
Please note that on Monday we encourage you to do a morning run, for most mileages, and then a shorter afternoon run. The rest of the practices will be in the morning.
